How do you know if something will work? 

You don’t. You can research an idea but research is not reality. In almost every instance, things will happen that you don’t expect and sometimes what you expect won’t happen at all. You can call this luck, or just life, but the fact remains that you can’t really tell what will happen to something until it’s released into the wild. 

For instance, in 1939 a law student called Chester Carlson invented the process of xerography. The idea was patented in 1940 but didn’t reach the market until 1959, largely because everyone that saw the idea rejected it. It was an ugly little idea with no apparent market because carbon paper could be used to make copies of outgoing letters and correspondence.

But xerography soon changed into photocopying and the Xerox Corporation took off, flying into virtually every office in the world. Like INXS once said, we all have wings, but some of us don’t know why.